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Kawasaki Ninja H2 - The fastest production motorcycle in the world?

I don't know about you guys, but I've made checking in on this Kawasaki Ninja H2 website part of my morning blog roundup. Even though the information they've released has been extremely limited, it's been enough to give me extremely high expectations, even if the H2 isn't the FZ-09 contender I'd dreamed about in our first post on it.

This latest video, released yesterday, shows a progression of motorcycles released by Kawasaki over the last four decades which were considered "leaders of their time."

The first bike shown is the GPZ900R, released in 1984, which was the fastest production bike in the world upon its launch. The second bike is the ZX-11, which reigned as speed king from 1990 until the Honda Blackbird's release in 1996. Next up is the ZX-12R which was released in 2000. Lots of people like to debate about whether it or the Hayabusa was fastest but, thanks to its 186 mph limiter, we'll never truly have a winner for this decade. The final bike shown is the current ZX-14R, which Kawi claims is the fastest accelerating motorcycle in the world.

This wonderful history lesson is followed by the message "2014 - Leading the industry into a new era..." which is followed by a teaser image of a sportbike.

Unfortunately, this means I may have to finally accept that I'm not getting a three-cylinder FZ-09 beater. Yes, I know we sort of (read: completely) already knew that, given nearly every other piece of evidence, but I had really talked myself into believing that the H2 reference referred to Kawasaki's three-cylinder past.

Fortunately, Kawi appears to have something even more ambitious to unveil, because it's making some really bold claims about the performance of this new motorcycle. Unless we're reading too far into this, I have to expect they think they have something that will beat the power-to-weight ratios of the Panigales, BMWS1000RRs, and RSV4s of the world, which is something we haven't seen from the Japanese brands in way too long.

The next video is scheduled for release this Thursday, Sept. 11, with the bike due to be released at Intermot on September 30th. I'd plan on being around a computer that day.